Driving sustainable change and user adoption

Rolled out in 2015, PowerApps is a powerful mobile solution that allows you to create, develop and share custom applications without the requirement of coding. With PowerApps, you can help streamline your organisation’s day to day tasks by creating business apps that can be built in weeks with limited technical knowledge. PowerApps provide simple drag-and-drop […]

It’s clear that Dynamics 365 for Field Service has been a key focus in the April updates with a long list of features. We have reviewed these to provide a summary of the most exciting and important ones. Scheduling capabilities Over the last few years, Microsoft has made significant investments in automated and optimized scheduling […]

Dynamics 365 for Customer Service April 2019 update will bring new features like SMS support, live chat, portal messaging, along with new Omni-channel engagement hub. In this blog, we will discuss some of the major features. Omni-channel engagement hub One of the most anticipated arrivals for Customer Service is the new Omni-channel engagement hub, a […]

In this blog post, we’ll guide you through the steps you need to take to deploy the latest Microsoft update for Dynamics 365. Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps (Sales, Service, Project Service, Field Service, and Marketing): Over the course of April, all customers will receive the April 2019 features. The updates will be deployed […]

Being one of the core apps in the Dynamics 365 ecosystem, we’re always excited to see what new features are coming in the latest round of updates. The April release doesn’t disappoint with a brand new configure-price-quote module and live org charts to help visualise how contacts are related to each other. Further improvements have […]

From the extensive list of updates announced for Power BI, we’ve picked the most important and exciting features that we consider to be beneficial for you. The following features, that are set to be released between April to September 2019, will help you provide streamlined and fast experience as well as acquaint you with more […]

Launched a year ago, Dynamics 365 for Marketing is a marketing automation tool that helps businesses find and nurture sales-ready leads, connect sales and marketing departments and automate processes. In this latest round of updates, Marketing will see a host of incremental improvements and enhanced extensibility capabilities. Here is some of the key functionality to […]

In our previous blog post , we outlined the best picks from the Microsoft Dynamics 365 October 2018 release. Adding up to the previous post, we are going to be looking at the updates of specific Dynamics 365 apps the upcoming blog articles, and Dynamics for Sales in this blog. This blog article, meanwhile, […]

Following another jam-packed Inspire Worldwide Conference, we are excited to update you on some of the features to be included in the October 2018 release. Being a Microsoft Silver partner and one of the longest serving Microsoft Dynamics CRM consultancies in the UK, it is our pleasure to share our learnings to our valued readers. […]

From the beginning of April 2018, Dynamics 365 customers will be able to benefit from yet another jam-packed release to help transform their business. With the impending GDPR, compliance is a key theme in the update with Microsoft reviewing the entire platform to ensure GDPR-ready following the privacy-by-design principle. Another more noticeable platform update is […]

Category: Microsoft Dynamics CRM News

What’s New in PowerApps April 2019 Release

What’s New in PowerApps April 2019 Release

Rolled out in 2015, PowerApps is a powerful mobile solution that allows you to create, develop and share custom applications without the requirement of coding. With PowerApps, you can help streamline your organisation’s day to day tasks by creating business apps that can be built in weeks with limited technical knowledge.

PowerApps provide simple drag-and-drop functionality to design apps and work on iOS, Android and Windows devices. They link seamlessly to Dynamics365 and other O365 products.

PowerApps has an intuitive visual design and has a familiar look and feel taken from applications like PowerPoint plus. Altogether this equals rapid development, speed to market and you don’t pay astronomical £100,000+ development costs.

With PowerApps getting a lot of attention and popularity day by day for its ability to rapidly develop custom apps, here are all the important updates that are set to roll out from April to September.

View results of formulas and subformulas in canvas apps

Canvas apps are operated by composing functions like ‘Filter’ and ‘Sort’ to form powerful formulas. When the compositions get much more complex then there is lack of transparency and makes it difficult to understand what’s happening and debug issues.

Now, this feature helps you to get into the middle of the formula and understand what’s happening in the system so that the understanding and debugging of apps get easier and quicker.

New view designer for CDS for Apps

With this new capability, building new system views is easy and quick with the new view designer. Some important ability includes:

Can add fields to the entity directly within the view designer.

Drag in new columns from the field drawer.

Add advanced filtering in the property pane.

Select columns to change the header name and to define a specific column width.

App-licensing requirements presented to makers while building apps

Users might need a different license to run the app if the maker adds a complex or restricted entity to a canvas app. Hence, App makers will be notified as shown in the figure below.

App usage reports in your inbox

From this update, app makers will regularly be notified (via email and in-product) about end-users app usage along with a recommendation to improve their app experience. Also, tailored based communication on the app to include recommendations for learning resources.

Improved inline help for makers and admins

App makers and admins will be assisted step-by-step guidelines with resources available in PowerApps studio, the Power Platform admin center, and Microsoft Flow for common scenarios.

We can see the example of guided-learning help for these common scenarios:

In Microsoft Flow, create an approval process.

In the Power Platform admin center, enable a mailbox to use server-side sync.

In PowerApps Studio, reuse menu selection in different screens.

Improved solution checking capabilities

Solution Checker is updated with new capabilities for parsing and acting on results. Also, performance and stability checks are implemented so that you can quickly identify problematic patterns in your solutions.

Embedding canvas apps in model-driven forms

New capabilities that enable deeper integrations between model-driven forms and embedded canvas apps are included in this release. Some of these capabilities include:

Trigger methods on the host model-driven form from the embedded canvas app.

Enhanced and streamlined authoring experience via the new model-driven form designer.

Create canvas apps with responsive layout

In the previous versions, screens of the canvas app are usually scaled to fit the space that the app host provides. But as the screens get bigger, the app can’t adapt to the environment. With this new update, users can now have better app experience that enables app makers to create responsive canvas apps by writing formulas.

One unified control framework

PowerApps Control Framework (PCF) is the interface for all the new controls across PowerApps for both canvas and model-driven apps. Through this new update, developers have access to a rich framework API set and can build production-grade controls due to continued investments in framework capabilities. Dev tools support building PCF controls, rule-based validation, faster testing and debugging, and solution deployment.

Sign in more easily to Dynamics 365 on a mobile device

You can now sign in to the D365 app on an Android device or iOS device using email address instead of server URLs and can access app across all their available online organizations and environment.

Test out new updates first in Preview

Customers were unable to sign up easily to get early access to updates across Dynamics 365 for customers engagements and were unable to develop and validate the apps. But with the new update, customers have a way to develop and test new updates to the platform and can create a ‘preview’ environment or they can copy an existing environment over to ‘preview’ from the Power Platform admin center.

Improved supportability for admin

Now admins have a unified support experience across all power platforms and can get self-help recommendation to resolve issues on their own. Also, they can have a seamless connection with Microsoft support agents and can get quick help in case of a system-wide issue impacting all users.

New storage-consumption and trend reports

Admins can have a closer look into how their organization consumes storage capacity and updated report of all storage consumed available from the admin center.

Unified Interface as the default experience

Unified interface in PowerApps improves user’s home page experience to view model-driven apps and space to work in simple purpose-built apps. This makes the unified interface better and more capable than legacy web experience.

Office value-adds in Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 users are part of this coherent experience, as their contact management in Unified Interface is enhanced by a seamless integration with live profile cards.

Streamlined PowerApps experience

New modern experiences working with Common Data Service for Apps are moving into one streamlined portal experience. Users will be able to move between form, entities, solution, and view designers in one shared web experience.

Share entities by using security groups in Azure Active Directory

You can share data in Common Data Service for Apps with one or more security groups in Azure Active Directory. To share this data, create one or more custom security roles for your entities and assign those roles to security groups instead of to individual users. You can share apps, flows, and entities with the same security group.

Seamless image support in CDS for Apps (Public Preview)

PowerApps that are built on Common Data Service (CDS) for Apps offer seamless support for images from all app types. Users can provide richer data in addition to attaching files and notes.

Teams is a first-class distribution channel

Deeper integration with Teams will allow IT admins to seamlessly publish any app built on the Microsoft Business Application Platform to the Teams App Catalog for broad app distribution in the enterprise through Teams.

If you have any questions in the meantime regarding the April update, just call our friendly team on 01296 328689. Our team will be more than pleased to discuss these with you.

If you want to learn about the other D365 related updates, follow the links below:

Also, being one of the most trusted Microsoft PowerApps partners, we have the capability to design and build custom solutions to meet your organisational needs. But first and foremost, we can help you understand the tremendous benefits of this tool and how it can leverage your business. Visit our PowerApps page or call us at +44 01296 328 689 to learn more.

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What’s New in Dynamics 365 for Field Service April 2019 Release

What’s New in Dynamics 365 for Field Service April 2019 Release

It’s clear that Dynamics 365 for Field Service has been a key focus in the April updates with a long list of features. We have reviewed these to provide a summary of the most exciting and important ones.

Scheduling capabilities

Over the last few years, Microsoft has made significant investments in automated and optimized scheduling capability. The April ‘19 update includes a powerful new Power BI dashboard to show optimisation summaries and statistics to help service managers and dispatchers evaluate optimisation results, measure scheduling objectives, and resource usage.

Optimisation objective for as soon as possible (ASAP)

There might be instances where you have more resource capacity than demand for resources and you have to decide whether to fully book some resources or leave some resources for a contingency plan. With this new optimisation objective for ASAP feature, you can select and prioritise other scheduling objectives to balance the need to reserve resources for urgent bookings with the goal to keeping your resources busy all day.

Enhanced multi-resource work order management

Introduced in the October 2018 release, this feature allows you to place many multi-resource work order scenarios. In this April update, enhancements have been made to improve the crew management and requirement group scheduling to make it easier for you to schedule, manage and complete multi-resource work order.

Variable resource location (optimisation)

This new feature will provide flexibility for the resources who don’t start their day from a fixed office location. For example, a resource may need to travel to a remote location occasionally or visit a client some other day. This new feature will allow managers organise schedules for resources to meet these location-based demands through an API that allows you to change your resources’ location.

If you have any questions in the meantime regarding the April update, just call our friendly team on 01296 328689. Our team will be more than pleased to discuss these with you.

If you want to learn about the other D365 related updates, follow the links below:

Do you know that Microsoft Dynamics for 365 Field Service can increase the efficiency of your field services resources and empowers your organisation to improve customer satisfaction? If you want to learn more about how D365 for Field Service can help your business, visit our Field Service page or call us at +44 01296 328 689.

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What’s New in Dynamics 365 for Customer Service April 2019 Release

What’s New in Dynamics 365 for Customer Service April 2019 Release

Dynamics 365 for Customer Service April 2019 update will bring new features like SMS support, live chat, portal messaging, along with new Omni-channel engagement hub. In this blog, we will discuss some of the major features.

Omni-channel engagement hub

One of the most anticipated arrivals for Customer Service is the new Omni-channel engagement hub, a cloud-based service that enables you to connect and communicate with your customers via live chat, SMS and customer service portals. This allows your agents to engage with your customers across different channels through a highly customisable app. To ensure utmost effectivity of your agents, this app offers contextual customer identification, real-time notifications, and agent productivity tools like knowledgebase integration, search and case creation.

SMS Support

This feature will help you create a two-way conversation through SMS to connect you more personally with your customers. Key capabilities include:

Two-way texting between customers and your organization for product inquiry, installation query, support issues and many more through direct text messages.

Note: Customers will need an SMS subscription with Telesign to leverage the two-way texting capabilities.

Live chat channel

Live chat is popular because of its simplicity and simultaneous engagement with multiple customers at a time. Key capabilities that aim to increase agent productivity:

You can now create multiple chat widgets to segregate Portal users and create personalised experiences based on their profile, organizational preferences, and location on the website.

You can configure business hours to hide the chat widget, show only during specific times, or show an offline survey outside of business hours.

Anticipate customer issues and address them proactively by creating rule-based triggers to create dynamic call-to-action bubbles on chat widgets. You can define your own rules based on your target audience, location, user context, and so on.

Portal messaging

It’s possible today for customers to create cases and request support using Dynamics 365 Portal. With Portal messaging, these work items can be routed to appropriate agents via the unified routing and work distribution system of Omni-channel Engagement Hub. Agents can use the same multi-session experience to handle these work items alongside those coming in from channels such as Live Chat, SMS, and so on.

Also, if you want to learn how this cutting-edge technology can empower your customer services team to revolutionise your customer experiences, visit our Customer Service page or call us at +44 01296 328 689.

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Over the course of April, all customers will receive the April 2019 features. The updates will be deployed automatically following Microsoft’s Safe Deployment Process (SDP). By the end of April, all customers will have had April ’19 features applied.

As for Dynamics 365 Marketing, you need to explicitly upgrade your app in the Dynamics 365 Marketing Admin Centre.

Which environment can be used for previewing features?

The environments or instances) that are eligible for enabling the preview features are Production, Trial, and Sandbox. This allows you the flexibility to explore the preview features, and then adopt them across your environments at a rate that suits your business.

We recommend you to create a copy of your Production environment as a Sandbox environment to try out the preview features. The Sandbox environments can be reset, backed up, and restored as you test features without impacting your Production users.

How do I enable the preview features in an environment?

On the Navigation menu on the left, select Environments and select the environment you want to enable the April 2019 updates.

On selecting, it will take you to the environment’s hub where you can select to manage the updates.

Select Activate now to activate the April 2019 updates.

When will the April 2019 features be enabled for customers who did not opt into the preview?

Starting April 5, 2019, Microsoft will enable the April 2019 features (end user impacting only) following Safe Deployment Process (SDP) across their global customer base. Your environment/org will be updated based on the region they are located.

As for the United Kingdom, the featured will be enabled on Friday, 12th April 2019.

Your environments will have the April 2019 updates automatically applied for the Dynamics 365 platform and will not require any action from the customer.

What’s New in Dynamics 365 for Sales April 2019 Release

What’s New in Dynamics 365 for Sales April 2019 Release

Being one of the core apps in the Dynamics 365 ecosystem, we’re always excited to see what new features are coming in the latest round of updates. The April release doesn’t disappoint with a brand new configure-price-quote module and live org charts to help visualise how contacts are related to each other. Further improvements have been made to the recently added Playbook feature and Microsoft Teams integration in addition to sales forecasting improvements. This blog post highlights some of the major updates in Dynamics 365 for Sales that roll out between April to September.

Microsoft Teams Integration

This integration was introduced in the last release to help your sales team collaborate with other teams who may be involved in helping with a sales deal, for example; marketing, legal or finance more effectively. With this new update, your sales reps can now easily work with the Dynamics 365 customer information and share files directly from Microsoft Teams. This update also allows you to access Dynamic 365 records by adding a Dynamic 365 tab into Teams channel.

One of the benefits of this update is the cross-functional collaboration: you can now work together with your customers and colleagues across functions, including those customers and staff members who do not have a Dynamics 365 user account.

Configure-price-quote integrated experience

This update is a big step forward for customers with complex quoting requirements since you can now easily find the best third-party CPQ solution provider to help your sales team quickly identify the right configuration of products that fit your customers’ needs. This helps you create accurate quotes and contracts with right pricing, considering all variable factors.

Content recommendation through Playbook

Also arriving in the April update is enhancements to the playbook feature, which supports sales enablement use cases and allows sales organisations to share best practices through scripted lists of activities including phone calls, tasks and appointments.

With this update, sales reps will be able to receive contextual content recommendations as they progress through the sales process. This new feature will enable your sales reps with additional details on what content to refer to whilst working through their sales activities such as documents and links to videos.

Manual sales forecasting

With manual sales forecasting, sales teams will be able to specify forecast categories for each opportunity and further leverage the information to create or update forecasts manually within the app. Sales teams will be able to view, adjust, and submit rollup forecasting values for individuals and their teams.

Live org chart

The new live org chart feature helps your sales more easily keep on top of an account’s contacts and even update, add, or delete contacts on the chart with simple drag and drop functionality.

If you have any questions in the meantime regarding the April update, just call our friendly team on 01296 328689. Our team will be more than pleased to discuss these with you.

If you want to learn about the other D365 related updates, follow the links below:

Dynamics 365 for Sales goes beyond the traditional sales force automation (SFA) and build deeper relationships with embedded intelligence to guide your sales team through each stage of your customer journey. Named as a leader in both Forrester Wave: Sales Force Automation Solutions Q2 2017 and in Gartner’s magic quadrant, Dynamics 365 for Sales helps you to better understand your customer needs, engage more effectively, and win more deals. If you want to learn more about D365 for Sales and how it can increase your revenue, visit our Sales page or call us at +44 01296 328 689 to learn more.

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What’s New in Power BI April 2019 Release

What’s New in Power BI April 2019 Release

From the extensive list of updates announced for Power BI, we’ve picked the most important and exciting features that we consider to be beneficial for you. The following features, that are set to be released between April to September 2019, will help you provide streamlined and fast experience as well as acquaint you with more actionable insights to help you make better business decisions.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Connector

You can now import data from LinkedIn Sales Navigator to provide you with valuable insight on what drives sales.

General availability of Power BI dataflows

With the introduction of Power BI dataflows, you can now use dataflows to comprehend data from both on-premises and cloud-based data sources and then map them to known Common Data Model entities, modify and extend existing entities, and create custom entities. Once you create a dataflow, you can use Power BI to create dashboards, reports, datasets, and apps that leverage the power of the Common Data Model to generate meaningful insights for your business activities.

Q&A – AutoSuggestions

In this upcoming release, Q&A will now automatically deliver suggested questions to all the users. This new feature will help both existing and new users to ask questions they might not have known they could ask before. The suggested questions will appear underneath the existing saved questions that a user can define.

Themes API

Using the Power BI Embedded Themes API, you will now be able to apply different types of themes like corporate, seasonal or any other available visuals to your entire report. All visuals in your report or tiles in your dashboard will use the colors from the themes you selected.

App navigation

End users might have to navigate between multiple reports when it comes to large scale deployments. App navigation tool will provide flexibility and power to customise navigation to the reporting teams so the end users will be able to navigate the reports quickly and easily.

New filter experience

Significant improvements to the October 2018 updates are made in the filter experience. The upcoming release will provide you reports to better understand which filters are affecting a visual, and also give you the authority over the look and feel of the visuals so that you can better interpret the insights.

If you have any questions in the meantime regarding April update, just call our friendly team on 01296 328689. Our team will be more than pleased to discuss these with you.

If you want to learn about the other D365 related updates, follow the links below:

Also, if you are looking for a Power BI solution or even if you have it but don’t know how to make the most of this powerful tool, we can help you. We can design and build business intelligence reports and dashboards customised to your specific needs. If you want to learn how to create your very own reports and dashboards, we can also provide you consultancy and training in PowerBI. Visit our PowerBI page or call us at +4401296328689 to learn more.

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What’s New in Dynamics 365 for Marketing April 2019 Release

What’s New in Dynamics 365 for Marketing April 2019 Release

Launched a year ago, Dynamics 365 for Marketing is a marketing automation tool that helps businesses find and nurture sales-ready leads, connect sales and marketing departments and automate processes.

In this latest round of updates, Marketing will see a host of incremental improvements and enhanced extensibility capabilities. Here is some of the key functionality to look out for in the April ’19 release:

Extensibility for campaigns and segments

One of the most exciting capabilities coming in April is APIs for customer journeys and segments. This feature allows you to integrate with external applications and services and makes it easier to connect with Microsoft tools like Flow.

With this feature, you can program your customer journey and modify its properties as required. You can also build an entire new segment based on an existing segment. You will also be able to start, stop or edit your customer journey. You can also use this feature to extend the marketing app, address self-service scenario and automate repetitive processes.

Integration with Content Management Systems

One of the shortfalls of Dynamics 365 for Marketing, when it was first released last year, was its inability to integrate with Content Management Systems (CMS). In the latest release, Microsoft has addressed this gap by providing the ability to integrate with any third-party content management such as; Joomla, WordPress, Weebly, etc. With this feature, you can host all Marketing forms and content on external CMS while still making the most of the existing features like the subscription centre and event portal.

Easy onboarding

There is also good news for users who need advanced assistance for onboarding processes. Microsoft has revamped this feature to ensure the users can sign up quickly and easily get started on their marketing tasks.

To make it especially easier for new users, a new ‘get started dashboard’ has been introduced. This feature calls out key marketing tasks like building a campaign and using insights. Whereas another feature called ‘guided tasks’ provide step-by-step guidance and context-sensitive help pane for important scenarios.

Social posting

You can now create social content for multiple channels and schedule social posts. This is a huge improvement from the previous version as there was no option to schedule social posts and users couldn’t view the content across channels using a single platform. You can also use dynamic content when posting on Twitter. More Social Media channels will be added in the next release.

Enhanced event registration experience

There are some exciting enhancements to the event registration experience. Some of them include:

Session registration for free events: This feature allows you to capture registrations at the session level for free events, which will help you to plan room capacities and notify you when the seat limit is full.

QR codes: You can now embed and send QR codes in emails. This feature will make it easy for your event registrants to check in using their mobile devices on the event day.

Marketer friendly segmentation experience

It is now easier to traverse complex relationships and build segments based on marketing interactions. This release also improves segmentation performance across the board to ensure the designer load times, segment deployment, and segment provisioning are faster.

Segment Boost

By analysing existing segments, this feature helps you find prospects who resemble and behave like the best contacts from your current segment. This feature will also help you find those contacts who have proven to be most successful, and then recommends you with a new collection of contacts who are ‘most likely to yield business returns’.

Spam score prediction for emails (AI)

This feature helps you in creating content that can add value to your customers. This system analyses your email content and predicts a spam score based on various factors such as the sender address, subject line, contents, embedded links, and more to avoid a poor response.

Website personalisation

You can now personalise landing pages for each prospect based on their attributes and past behaviour. This personalization can be done to the layout, dynamic content, branding, and more. For example, when you send an email to your prospect and when they click the CTA link, they get their personalised local weather and event news.

If you have any questions in the meantime regarding the April update, just call our friendly team on 01296 328689. Our team will be more than pleased to discuss these with you.

If you want to learn about the other D365 related updates, follow the links below:

Are you thinking of implementing an all-encompassing marketing solution that can help you with marketing activities like multichannel marketing, personalise communications and event management? As an independent consultant, we can help with all your marketing needs — from strategic planning to implementation to training — our experienced consultants can help you achieve your marketing goals. Visit our Marketing page or call us at +44 01296 328 689 to learn more.

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Overview of Dynamics 365 for Sales — October 2018 Release

Overview of Dynamics 365 for Sales — October 2018 Release

In our previous blog post , we outlined the best picks from the Microsoft Dynamics 365 October 2018 release. Adding up to the previous post, we are going to be looking at the updates of specific Dynamics 365 apps the upcoming blog articles, and Dynamics for Sales in this blog.

This blog article, meanwhile, will focus on the new capabilities for Dynamics 365 for Sales. The new features Microsoft have outlined is set to roll out between October 2018 and March 2019 with initial public preview. However, the new functionalities are subject to change or may not ship at all.

The following are list of the important updates sales teams can look forward to:

Playbook

LinkedIn Updates

Microsoft Teams Integration

Who knows who

Talking Points

Quick Actions

Predictive lead Scoring

Relationship analytics now with LinkedIn InMail

AI for Sales App

Playbook:

Playbooks is a new feature introduced to Dynamics 365 for Sales to help sales team members to automate repetitive activities and tasks when a particular scenario occurs.

For example, if a decision maker of an organisation leaves the business whilst you have an open opportunity with them thus putting the opportunity at risk. With Playbooks, automation can trigger a series carefully orchestrated tasks and activities for the sales representative to carry out to find out the new decision maker and salvage the opportunity. Playbook is set to release under general availability in October 2018.

LinkedIn Updates:

LinkedIn Insights enhances the LinkedIn Sales Navigator controls by combining it with the power and flexibility of the Dynamics 365 business process flow. Combining LinkedIn Insights to stages of a business process flow allows data driven users to gather information quickly and accurately to drive the process forward.

For example, in the initial stage of a sales process, LinkedIn Sales Insights can gather essential information about companies including size, industry and location as well as information about people; this includes name, company, position, and years of experience. Icebreakers and conversation starter insights can also be leveraged to start a warm engagement.

Like Playbook, LinkedIn Updates is also set to release under general availability in October 2018.

Microsoft Teams Integration

With more and more organisations leveraging Microsoft Teams as part of their collaboration tool, users will now be able to connect any Dynamics 365 record to a Microsoft Teams channel.

The Microsoft Teams integration with Dynamics 365 brings together the capabilities that salespeople need to collaborate more effectively.
The key benefits of Microsoft Teams integration include:

Users can communicate more effectively through persistent chat sessions across the Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365 records

Files get stored in one central location, ensuring the entire team has easy, consistent, and secure access to the latest documents

Users can make updates to the connected Dynamics 365 record from within Microsoft Teams

Who knows who:

This new feature allows staff to identify which one of their colleagues within their organization can facilitate an introduction to their prospect leads or contacts.

Like LinkedIn TeamLink, the feature uses Microsoft Exchange to identify which staff members within the organisation has had previous engagement with a contact or lead and who can provide you with that warm introduction.

Like the LinkedIn Icebreaker functionality, using built in AI, Talking Points captures the past communications Sales professionals have had with customers and extract key details about them on topics such as sports, health, family, and entertainment.

These topics help sales professionals with conversation starters or even build relationships with the contact.

Quick Actions (Public Preview)

Quick Actions works off enhanced AI capabilities by analysing past customer interactions and provide contextual suggested next best actions. Also, Microsoft, for the first time, are planning to enable users to speak notes directly into Dynamics from their phone.

Examples of Quick Actions include creating a follow up task, making a phone call or booking in an appointment.

Predictive lead Scoring (Public Preview)

Microsoft is introducing a machine learning model that scores leads on a scale of 1-100 based on likelihood of becoming an opportunity. It allows sales professionals to priorities their efforts on the deals more likely to close.

The key benefits of Predictive Lead Scoring include:

Out-of-the-box machine learning model that considers attributes from related entities such as Contact and Account

Ability to select/de-select signals for the model enabling model customization and tuning.

Predictive score backed by top reasons influencing the score.

Lead score along with score trend and top reasons available on out-of-box-forms and views.

Relationship analytics now with LinkedIn InMail (Public Preview)

The current feature of Relationship analytics helps sales professionals manage the opportunities pipeline by analysing the engagement data from Dynamics 365 and Exchange Online to track trends in a relationship such as positive or negative sentiment. The upcoming LinkedIn InMail integration will make Relationship analytics much smarter in providing the health of a sales deal.

AI for Sales App (Public Preview)

With all the built in AI capabilities Dynamics 365 provides, Microsoft have created a new AI app for sales management to help them managers evaluate and improve the performance of their sales teams.

The new AI app has a home page that provides managers with answers to the most common questions regarding their team’s performance and provides useful insights to quickly allow them to focus on the right deals and activities.

Below are some of the features of AI for Sales App:

A natural language processing-based Q&A that allows managers to conversationally ask questions and receive reports from the sales data.

The aforementioned points are some of the major functional updates Microsoft are bringing to Dynamics for Sales coming this October. Stay tuned for more blog articles that will highlight the updates in other important Dynamics 365 apps.

If you would like to find out how you can take advantage of the latest Dynamics for Sales updates within your organisation, contact us today for a no obligation consultation on 01296 328 689.

Best Picks from The Upcoming Microsoft Dynamics 365 October 2018 Release

Best Picks from The Upcoming Microsoft Dynamics 365 October 2018 Release

Following another jam-packed Inspire Worldwide Conference, we are excited to update you on some of the features to be included in the October 2018 release. Being a Microsoft Silver partner and one of the longest serving Microsoft Dynamics CRM consultancies in the UK, it is our pleasure to share our learnings to our valued readers.

The Inspire Worldwide Conference, which featured some of the most senior Microsoft staffs in the Business Applications, Modern Workplace and Azure product areas, was based around corenotes presentations followed by breakout sessions for the various products and platforms Microsoft offers. The event also featured Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, who highlighted the importance of “cloud technologies” and explained how customers can benefit from the new technologies Microsoft are building.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 was one of the core area of focus during the event as it was positioned as the foundation for all business operations. Revealed at the event, Microsoft is preparing to deploy over 90+ major updates to their platform’s 10 core apps, plus further tweaks to supporting services such as Portals and Social Engagement. Since all the updates in one blog post would be overwhelming for you to read, we are breaking down the updates in a series of posts, starting with 10 major highlights.

1. Dynamics 365 AI for Sales

Building upon the Relationship Assistant we have already come to know and love within the Dynamics 365 for Sales App. Microsoft is releasing a new app designed to help sales teams utilise intelligent features like call sentiment analysis, and alerts about the health of the deals and activities, to keep businesses on the top of the customer sales cycle.

AI for Sales, which will be available for preview in the impending October 2018 updates, will use machine learning to deliver data-driven insights to help businesses make more insightful and proactive decisions. The new AI for Sales app also consists of a natural language processing-based Q&A that allows managers to conversationally ask questions and receive reports from the sales data – providing even more productivity benefits and making it easier to access information ‘on the go’.

2. Improved Dynamics 365 Unified Interface

Unified Interface was introduced in Dynamics 365 version 9.0 (previous version) with an aim to provide users a better user experience with a consistent, accessible and uniform user interface across all devices. It was responsively designed to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience common to all screen size and devices. However, the mobile experience still fell short in comparison to the desktop experience with several features missing.

In response, the upcoming Unified Client Interface updates, will allow users to add controls to the UI for bulk edits, advanced finds, merge records, share records, and running on-demand workflows, which will help users improve performance and usability.

3. Custom Controls in Business Process Flow

Business process flow works as a guide in the form of stages and steps: stages show the process you are in; steps are action items that help you achieve the desired outcome. In short, it is a streamlined user experience defined by a set of stages that end users walk through.
The previous versions of Dynamics 365 only allowed default visualizations for the field type like text boxes, dropdowns and numbers. Thus, a user wasn’t allowed to create custom forms for entities based on business process flow.

However, with the latest release, business process flow steps support custom controls for rich visualisations in the form of sliders, radial knobs, timelines, and LinkedIn controls. Also, this feature is available in both the Unified Interface and the Web Client.

4. LinkedIn Integration

Sales Navigator was connected in the previous release, where LinkedIn widgets provided insights about contacts and companies in the Dymanic interface. However, the scope for customisation was limited and were detached from sales processes. Now with the impending new release, Dynamics 365 applications powered by LinkedIn Insights enhances the LinkedIn Sales Navigator controls by combining it with the power and flexibility of the Dynamics 365 business process flow. Combining LinkedIn Insights to stages of a business process flow allows data driven users to gather information quickly and accurately to drive the process forward.

For example, in the initial stage of a sales process, LinkedIn Sales Insights can gather essential information about companies including size, industry and location as well as information about people; this includes name, company, position, and years of experience. Icebreakers and conversation starter insights can also be leveraged to start a warm engagement.

LinkedIn Insights enhances the LinkedIn Sales Navigator controls by combining it with the power and flexibility of the Dynamics 365 business process flow. Combining LinkedIn Insights to stages of a business process flow allows data-driven users to gather information quickly and accurately to drive the process forward.

5. Power BI Visualisations Embedded in Web Portal

As Dynamics 365 customers may already be aware, a fully-integrated web portal is already included with 5 x full user licenses or the Customer Engagement Plan. We are excited to learn that the latest update brings a lot of new features that will help the users utilise the web portal in a much better way.

One of the interesting updates about the new release is that it allows users to embed Power BI visualisations with the Portal. With Power BI being one of the best business intelligence platforms on market to deliver insights and interactive visualisations of data, this new update can now securely embed Power BI reports and dashboards within portal pages using liquid code.

One major feature about this update is that Portal users without Power BI licenses will still have access to the Power BI content. Also, filter parameters can also be applied to personalize the Power BI content.

6. Microsoft Teams Integration

With more and more organisations leveraging Microsoft Teams as part of their collaboration tool, users will now be able to connect any Dynamics 365 record to a Microsoft Teams channel.

The new integration will also help teams working on a collaborate deal regardless of where they are working from. It will be easier for individual opportunities to be pinned to a Team associated with the prospective deal. Additionally, users can communicate more effectively through persistent chat sessions across the Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365 records.

7. Social Listening in Dynamics 365 for Marketing App

One of the new features in the Marketing platform is the addition of Social Listening, which allows marketers to add relevant social tags to the customer journey, events, and other entities. Social listening collects data generated from all the social networks and provides valuable insights like how each phrase is mentioned over time, the sentiment associated with each mention, influences mentioning that phrases, and many others.

Users will now be able to view the social media response in a new dashboard for social insights helping them track their marketing initiatives alongside other marketing insights in real-time.

8. Resource Scheduling Optimisation in Field Service

Resource Scheduling Optimisation is an add-on capability in the Dynamics 365 for Field Service application build to automatically schedule work orders by optimizing bookings to the most appropriate resources, while simultaneously optimizing appointment setting for travel time, mileage, and many other constraints.

The new release will have plenty of updates in the Universal Resource Scheduler feature. Users will now gain a lot of flexibility to assign work orders to a group of resources. A new “Crew Scheduling” option will be added, that will group people and other resources together for a defined time. This feature is brought to fix the issue of the previous version, where a group of people wasn’t allowed to be grouped together for a task.

9. Business Application Platform Capabilities

The October 2018 update will combine all the Business Application Platform tools — PowerBI, Flow, PowerApps and Common Data Service — in the same interface to help users trade app activity and usage more easily. For example, the October release will enable Common Data Service (CDS) to combine with PowerApps to model sophisticated business solutions. Combining CDS with PowerApps, a user can create a high productivity point-and-click app which is easily customisable and quick to develop.

These upcoming capabilities, powered by insights and intelligence from data across business systems, will integrate with the business applications people use every day to provide rich and intelligent experiences. This integration will also enable users to extend and customise Dynamics 365 with Office 365 into the users’ environment.

10. Social Engagement

Microsoft Social Engagement is a very powerful app that helps organisations harness the power of the web – social, search, browse — to achieve better sales and marketing results. In the October release, users will be equipped with a lot of new features, fixes, and changes in the Social Engagement platform.

Key improvements include; a new sign-in process to help users get started with the platform; a guided experience when defining search topics and deeper integration with other business applications including Marketing and Sales. Users will now be benefitted with enhanced user guidance experience that will help them quickly learn how to use the app effectively. A new feature that will be added is the “additional languages”. Several additional languages will be added for both the UI as well as for data acquisition.

The latest Dynamics 365 release is just another example of Microsoft’s continual investment into the latest technologies and user experience being released in October. Stay tuned for more blog articles that will highlight the updates in the specific Dynamics 365 apps.

If you would like to find out how you can take advantage of the latest updates within your organisation, contact us today for a no obligation consultation on 01296 328 689.

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Dynamics 365 ’18 Spring Release Round-Up

Dynamics 365 ’18 Spring Release Round-Up

From the beginning of April 2018, Dynamics 365 customers will be able to benefit from yet another jam-packed release to help transform their business.

With the impending GDPR, compliance is a key theme in the update with Microsoft reviewing the entire platform to ensure GDPR-ready following the privacy-by-design principle.

Another more noticeable platform update is an enhancement to the user interface (that Microsoft dubs the Unified Interface Framework), which provides greater differentiation between different page elements to improve accessibility and as a response to customer feedback about there being too much “white space”

As with all of the Dynamics 365 apps, D365 for Marketing is part of the same platform, and helps join up sales and marketing business processes helping both functions work collaboratively throughout the sales cycle.

General release of Dynamics 365 Business Central

The Business Central app provides organisations with a single end-to-end platform to manage their finances, operations, sales and customer service all in one place. The solution provides a perfect opportunity for organisations to upgrade their entry-level accounting software and legacy ERP systems.

Needless to say, it is fully integrated with Office 365 offering a wealth of productivity benefits and can be further extended with other Microsoft cloud services including; Office 365, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow and Power BI.

Dynamics 365 Business Central is essentially a re-brand of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Financials & Operations and brings the full power of Microsoft Dynamics NAV to the cloud as part of the D365 suite.

Dynamics 365 for Sales Update

Microsoft continues to evolve its Dynamics 365 Sales App further leveraging machine learning and analytics as well as providing deeper integration to LinkedIn and Office 365.

Key changes:

New ‘Professional’ license available at £49 per user per month in addition to the Enterprise license, which provides a cut-down version of the sales and service capabilities.

Dynamics 365 for Customer Service Update

The focus of Microsoft’s investment in Customer Service in the Spring release is based on improved user experience, performance, developer productivity and compliance rather than new features.

Capabilities and enhancements include;

Customer Service Hub application for case and knowledge management replaces the Interactive Service Hub and provides an intuitive application for those users focused on answering customer service enquiries that is optimized for different screen sizes, devices and orientations.

Dynamics 365 Portal can be used to create cloud-hosted web portals for external audiences and now provides the ability to search within attachments to improve the relevance of searches.

Voice of Customer Surveys have been improved with; the ability to cascade the deletion of surveys, survey translation enhancements, the ability to dynamically insert question responses into subsequent questions and improved analytics capabilities with the Voice of Customer content pack for Power BI.

In Public Preview

Unified Service Desk has tools to help developers with deploying, configuring and extending the applications.

Customer Service Hub pages can now be embedded within the Unified Service Desk with the ability to integrate business process flows

Dynamics 365 for Field Service

Dynamics 365’s Field Service app is design to help organisations manage field-based service teams with;

Work order management

Scheduling, dispatch and routing of technicians to customer sites

Repairs and returns management

Inventory management

Mobile app for field teams

In the Spring Wave update, the Field Service App sees improvements to resource scheduling and optimization (RSO) and the ability to associate 3D content with customer asset records. Further investment has also been made to Connect Field Service (IoT) capability helping organisations proactively detect, troubleshoot and resolve service issues so technicians are only dispatched when necessary.

Enhancements include:

Associate 3D content with customer asset records. There is now the ability to upload 3D models or sequences (hosted either externally or within Dynamics 365) and associate these with customer asset records for use by technicians within the mobile app. Support file formats are hITF, FBX, GLB and OBJ.

Schedule board list view allows data to be visualised in a more meaningful way.

Run resource simulations without affecting actual bookings allowing administrators to understand the effects of adjusting optimization scope, constraints, objectives and other parameters to determine what optimisation configuration best matches business goals and objectives.

Include skill level as part of resource requirements to better match staff to the job requirement.

Connected Field Service (IoT) enhancements

Synchronisation of device conditions and properties with device twins

Synchronisation of device tags with device twins

Configuration of device properties and commands through device categories

Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation

The Spring release of the Project Service App includes multidimensional pricing capabilities and improvements to the work breakdown structure. As with Field Service, Universal Resource Scheduling now includes a list view to be able to see data in a more meaningful way.

Enhancements include

Custom pricing dimensions for resource pricing

Dimension priority and dimension context for resolution

Price mark-ups and mark-downs

Work breakdown structure editable grid with Gantt visualization

Extensible time and expense entry

Universal Resource Scheduling list view

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